The present invention relates to water reclamation systems, and in particular to gray water reclamation systems.
As known in the art, “gray” water refers to water containing low levels of contaminants and which is typically not potable, but can be recycled and used in particular applications, such as irrigation water, toilet water, as well as some industrial applications. “Black” water is distinguished from gray water in that black water contains a high amount of particulates and/or contaminants which requires heavy water treatment. Fresh or “white” water is water which is most commonly used by people for drinking and cooking.
While fresh water is absolutely essential for life, it has become a diminishing resource around the world. As populations in arid areas continue to expand, drought conditions affect wide spread areas, and pollution from factories and plants contaminate water reserves, fresh water is becoming more difficult to obtain, and increasingly expensive when it is possible to do so. In certain areas around the globe, fresh water has been completely exhausted or contaminated, and this trend is expected to become more pervasive in larger and more industrial areas.
Gray water reclamation has been a central point in proposed approaches to conserve fresh water resources. Many of these approaches have been guided by the fact that gray water and black water are often produced by different sources within the same system (e.g., in a residential plumbing system gray water collected from a shower and black water collected from a kitchen garbage disposal), and have thus attempted to meet the needs of such a system by separately plumbing the collection systems of the black and gray water sources. This approach is exceedingly expensive to implement, as two separate drainage systems under such an approach would need to be installed and maintained. Retrofitting an existing plumbing system would be even more expensive, if it is possible to do so at all.
Others have anticipated these problems, and have proposed a somewhat more shared system in which gray and black water are collected. In one approach, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,217,042 and 5,498,330 propose using the same footprint of an existing plumbing line to plumb a two-in-one drain line. This approach suffers from some of the aforementioned difficulties, in that extensive retrofitting of the single drain line to a two-in-one drain line is required. Further, the resulting black and gray water drain lines are significantly reduced in their respective diameters, leading possibly to an increased number of blocks, and maintenance time and expense. In another of these approaches described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,112,972, an upstream portion of the drain line is used to collect gray water, and a downstream portion is used to collect black water. This approach is limited to those structures in which black water sources are located down stream from gray water sources, an arrangement which is not feasible for most structures, given the number of different black water sources and their varied locations throughout the structure.
What is therefore needed is an improved gray water system which can be implemented in most existing structures without extensive retrofitting.